That's the scoop gleaned off the LinkIn Profile for Robert Morgan, Senior Research & Development at Microsoft, anyway:

Working in high security department for research and development involving strategic planning for medium and longterm projects. Research & Development projects including 128bit architecture compatibility with the Windows 8 kernel and Windows 9 project plan. Forming relationships with major partners: Intel, AMD, HP, and IBM.

Robert Morgan is working to get IA-128 working backwards with full binary compatibility on the existing IA-64 instructions in the hardware simulation to work for Windows 8 and definitely Windows 9.

Ars has a ton more super-nerdy tidbits about what's possible in Windows 8 that's worth checking out, if you're a supernerd, anyway. [Ars]